Instead, she felt strangely off-balance.
He didn’t just let her go.
He pushed her forward gently so that she stood fully upright, then carefully removed his arms. Only then did he step back. Each thing happened in a precise order, with obvious intent, and yet, the whole thing happened so quickly it felt instantaneous.
Really, his movements felt like some perfectly orchestrated dance, with every pound of her flesh and his adjusted exactly to where he wanted it.
For the same reason, she felt strange when the Traveler’s arms retracted from around her body, and his body retreated from hers.
Her feelings of being off-balance weren’t about her body.
They were about him being there, more or less holding her up, and not only physically… …and then, just as suddenly, him being gone.
He cleared his throat, his words matter-of-fact.
“Check the portal, Lightbringer. It doesn’t smell any better in here with time.”
A note of amusement reached his strangely deep voice.
Despite that, and despite his words, he still had that different, more serious tenor to him, the one that made him seem older, and perhaps more like a king.
“…This body is hungry,” he added. “And this wretched place is ruining my next meal.”
That time, she gave him an over the shoulder glance.
It was a quick look, almost furtive.
She had no idea what he was thinking now, or why he’d just hugged her. Seeing him looking around at the graffiti-covered walls, a faint grimace on his mouth and partly crinkling his nose, she fought not to smile.
Perhaps she was reading too much into it.
She was definitely reading too much into it.
Even so, something in her had changed as well. She felt his attention on her still, more intently than before… only now, strangely, it didn’t bother her.
That difference made her pause.
She could breathe again.
She didn’t know if the layer he’d melted in her was denial, as he’d theorized, self-protection, months or years of feeling too alone in her role here, or if it had something to do with just finding out she was the last living member of her kind.
Truthfully, she didn’t much care.
She’d never been one for psychoanalyzing herself.
She felt better.
She felt lighter, and better, as if some movement had returned to her mind, to her ability to think and feel.
For now, it was enough.
She turned again, staring at the Traveler, who had his hands stuffed inside the pockets of his long coat. He was looking out through the bars of the back end of the cage, squinting at the display area for the great cats, back when the zoo was still in operation.
Briefly, she considered thanking him.
Then, feeling some part of him push back against that, she erased the thought from her mind.
Clearing her throat, much as he had done, she turned to face the portal.
He was right.
She had come here for a reason.
She couldn’t take his actions personally, or think he somehow did them for personal reasons. Hell, she didn’t even know what he’d done, much less why.
She just knew she felt different.
She felt like herself again.
It was enough.
9
Intruders
That time, when she held up her hands, Alexis’s mind felt clear.
Her shoulders felt looser, her hands and fingers spread.
Her concentration sharpened as she walked forward.
Her eyes focused on the gold scepter covered in green and red jewels under the giant paws of the lifelike lion.
She placed her hands on either side of the lion’s jaws, around the dark red tongue and sharp white teeth, the mouth open in mid-roar. As soon as her skin kissed the painted wall, the cement surface rippled.
The Traveler moved closer.
Without looking at him, she felt his interest.
She fought not to focus on him, or how different she felt after what he’d done to her.
She concentrated on the wall.
Specifically, she concentrated on the portal.
Briefly, she focused on pushing through the spells, protections, illusions, and shields she’d put all around it to obscure her portal from view.
After all, the abandoned zoo was something of a pilgrimage for a lot of people.
While not exactly teeming with crowds, people came up here.
They hiked. They picnicked.
They tagged the cement walls.
They drank alcohol. Smoked pot.
A fair few came to see the Old Zoo itself, while a tiny percentage of those made it to this back-end segment of the abandoned cages that once housed the big cats.
Regardless, even a small number wasn’t zero. The layers of graffiti and trash alone were proof enough that more than a handful of people found their way in here over the years.
For the same reason, Alexis rendered the portal invisible to human eyes.
Humans were the least of her problems, though.
The real trick was hiding the portal from other beings. That was true not only of beings from other dimensions; Alexis also worked hard to keep the portals hidden from supernatural creatures living here, meaning those permanently residing on her version of Earth.
Vampires, for one, were exceedingly good at sensing out illusions.
Some witches had that talent for that as well, although most were not so highly-skilled.
Fae were well-nigh impossible to fool, but luckily had little interest in the portals, and therefore barely registered on her radar most days.
Shifters, as a category, was far easier to fool with relatively basic illusions, despite their immense talents as trackers.
Some interdimensional shifters, not dissimilar to Travelers, could be exceedingly clever about finding any type of portal, and the malevolent ones were a serious pain in Alexis’ ass. More run-of-the-mill shifters, like the Earth werewolves and other, similar species, were less attuned to such things, and rarely, if ever, posed a problem.
Then there were the angels and demons.
Alexis thought of those as more “interdimensional straddlers.”
A lot of angels and demons lived on Earth more or less permanently––too many for Alexis to do much more than monitor them periodically to make sure the darker forces there weren’t up to anything that might cause her real problems.
New ones slipped through the portals too, of course, and sometimes caused infestations among the humans.
Those, like the most recent bunch, could be a serious time suck.
Gods were even more of a pain in her ass, but luckily, they usually weren’t here for long, and they were less likely to be purely malevolent for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Gods were more inscrutable than evil, per se.
They had a tendency to run their own agendas, and while their motives were often surprisingly petty, they rarely had much to do with the human world, at least not directly. In general, their motives in coming to Earth usually had little to do with Earth itself.
Only a few gods had actual designs on Earth-related things.
Most just hid out here, or came to Earth for vacation––often a sex-cation, Alexis noted––usually to avoid some responsibility or other back in their home-dimension. Alexis was usually able to nudge them into leaving when they seemed on the verge of causing the locals problems.
That, or she could appeal to higher authorities, usually from their home worlds.
A few of those times, other gods arrived to deal with the offending party.
The rest of the time, she used spells, enchantments, illusions, and even curses to keep possible mischief-makers away.
She barred all witches from access to the gates.
That was relatively easy.
Witches, powerful or not, were still human.
On the more challenging end
of the spectrum, she added spells meant to keep away strange vampires, necromancers, and other half-humans, including shifters.
She didn’t stop there.
After the last angel fiasco, she added a few things specifically to repel and deter fallen angels, not to mention demons, half-demons, half-angels, and demon-possessed humans.
Those might not work so great, but she had to hope they might slow the fuckers down, at least, make the portal tougher to find.
She also did what she could to make it difficult to find one’s way back here.
Physically, that is.
Only one of the chain-link fences leading to the back end of the cat cages opened enough for a single person to squeeze through.
Angel fire would likely melt that fence easily, but most witch spells wouldn’t.
Alexis closed those openings behind her when she came and went, melting the metal with her own, Lightbringer magic, and fusing it into the cement.
She knew she should probably cover the place entirely with repellant spells, making the entrance impossible for a regular human to pass, but some part of her had been reluctant to do that, for a few reasons.
One, people liked the Old Zoo.
It was a nostalgia thing for a lot of Angelenos, and she was reluctant to take that away from them, when really she only needed them to stay away from a small corner of it.
Two, she worried she might just make the site more obvious to the wrong beings.
Some curious, bored and/or overly-creative supernatural might see her repelling spells and decide there was something here worth messing with.
Now that she had Lucifer himself living in her town, she hadn’t wanted to risk it.
Looking around now, however, she found herself thinking that time had likely come.
She had to lock off this area totally.
Tomorrow, she told herself. I’ll do it tomorrow. Assuming nothing pops through here tonight and finishes what they started.
The thought came with a thread of dark humor.
Really, nothing about the situation should have been funny.
It was just her way of whistling in the dark.
Closing her eyes, she focused her mind on the portal itself.
Her hands sank deeper into the painted rock.
As soon as she found a resonance with the light of the gate, she flinched.
Images rushed at her, disorienting in their silence.
Feeling hit at her, too, not all of it hers.
The vortex of the Los Angeles door appeared first.
Glimpses of all the other doors followed, starting with those on Earth, in cities scattered across the globe.
All of those connections remained intact.
As far as she could tell, the lit tunnels remained in place, connecting every door, connecting the Earth doors with the doors on the other, physical worlds––meaning those within the same dimension.
She noticed nothing broken.
None of the doors or connections appeared to be missing.
From this space, she looked down at the entire network from above, a green and scarlet spiderweb of lit strands tying one door to the next in an intricate map.
After counting them all to make sure she hadn’t missed any, Alexis focused on the primary door, the one she hadn’t created herself.
That was the one door, the only door, she generally tried to stay away from.
She went to it––in person, that is––only about once a year.
While there, Alexis reinforced spells, added to them, redid them with her improved skills, dismantled and rebuilt them. She layered on as many illusions and barriers as she could, picking up new ones at every opportunity.
She changed the passwords, in other words.
As many of them as she possibly could.
She never went the same time of the year.
She never took the same route to reach it.
Alexis’ primary job as Lightbringer in this dimension was to prevent malignant creatures and forces from gaining control over that door, and/or using it to gain control over the network as a whole. If she allowed anyone or anything to corrupt, break, close, damage, or commandeer that particular door, Earth would become nothing more than a playground for dark beings.
The Ancients would likely erase the door altogether if that happened.
If the Ancients took that nearly unprecedented step, this dimension, including Earth, would be cut off from all the other dimensions and worlds. And while that might not sound like a problem to your average human, who believed the Earth to be alone in the dimensional universe already… Alexis knew it would be a problem.
It would be a big, damned, horrifying problem.
Like with the corrupted gate, it would plunge Earth into chaos and darkness.
Errr… more chaos and darkness.
Exponentially worse and more chaos and darkness.
Even now, she scanned meticulously before she got too close to that primary gate. She felt for all of those creatures who might pose a threat, who might be watching her.
She felt for Earth creatures first.
She felt for the straddlers next: angels and demons, fallen angels and archangels.
She felt for gods last of all.
None appeared to be doing anything that rose to the level of her active awareness, much less a four-alarm fire. While they certainly weren’t all happy and benign, none appeared to be in the midst of hatching active, ongoing plots to destroy the known universe… at least not that Alexis could feel… at least not right now.
Reassuring herself with a second scan, she decided it was as safe as things would likely get under the circumstances.
Briefly… very briefly… she focused on the primary door.
She winced, hit immediately with light and sound, fleeting glimpses of what had happened in other worlds.
She heard disturbingly familiar-sounding screams.
She swore she heard Darynda, screaming into that void. She got whispers of other voices she knew: Jain, Krikre, Malin, Sarli, Nadiana, Luchian, Vorlan––
She fought to extricate herself.
She fought to shut down her heart, trying only to see… not feel.
She told herself she had to.
After all, she couldn’t see them clearly if she let herself fall into them, into their fear, into the screams she felt on the other end of those crossing lines.
She knew that wasn’t all of it.
She also knew some part of her needed to feel it, needed to know.
Not just hear it from the Traveler, but know.
That same part of her sought out the other Lightbringers desperately, looking for some evidence they were still alive, that they were still there.
Unfortunately, the more she stared into that abyss, the worse the news felt.
The space where they used to be was just… empty.
She reached deeper, but the most she felt was the flavors of those friends, the echoes of their screams.
They no longer felt alive.
They were no longer there.
Not quite silent. Not yet entirely erased from view.
Yet, the echoes were already growing fainter.
The reality of that had her reaching further, more frantically into that dark, silent space. A kind of panic hit as that silence only spread. She watched the vortices spin, multi-colored clouds rotating in a spiral of presence and light, pulling on her to go all the way through.
In the end, she forced herself to pull back.
She couldn’t risk falling all the way in.
She couldn’t risk being seen by whoever had done this.
She knew there was a good chance someone still watched.
Whoever was behind this might still monitor the network, even with the Ancients searching for them. She focused on the vortices themselves, still feeling for who had done this, what type of creature it might be. The primary portal: a deeper, wider, wilder vortex than any she managed to build on her own, threw data at he
r, more images, more screams, more fear, more silence, more presences, but none of it made sense.
None of it clarified anything.
The vortex pulled on her, inexorable.
It pulled on her body, her spirit, her light.
It pulled on her for what she was.
But it told her nothing. It provided no answers.
She watched the tunnels rotate, unchanged despite the silence of the other Lightbringers, filled with a multitude of colors––a thousand shades of blue, white, gold, green, scarlet, orange, violet, purple, yellow, red, magenta, turquoise, black, silver.
Lightbringer.
The voice was soft, cajoling.
Not just one voice, many voices.
Or possibly one voice holding multitudes.
Lightbringer, it murmured. Come to us. Join your brethren… they are free now. They are one with us. Be with them… free yourself…
Fear sparked through her.
She felt them.
Darkness surrounded her, but she felt them.
She felt the pull there.
It grew so intense, she gasped.
Looking down at her hands and forearms and wrists, she realized the pull wasn’t only psychological. It wasn’t only in her mind, or part of her vision of the vortices.
Lit strings wrapped around her.
They bound her wrists, her fingers, her arms up to the elbow.
They glowed.
Hard, metallic silver, they twined around her like they belonged to something alive, like tails or tentacles made of pure energy. Whatever was behind them, they were strong as hell. The pull had crept up on her, but now that she was pulling back, the tentacles gripped tighter, yanking her more insistently towards the vortex’s pipeline.
The sheer strength behind it sucked the air from her lungs.
She let out a cry, more shock and disgust than understanding.
She felt herself falling into the wall.
She could even feel the direction of the pull now.
They wanted her with them. They wanted to take her out of this dimension altogether.
They were pulling her towards the primary door.
Suddenly, all of it was one hundred percent real.
Alexis’s mind clicked violently on.
She realized what was happening, realized she’d allowed herself to be overcome by grief, that it gave them an “in” that nearly took her along with the rest of them.
Lightbringer: An Enemies to Lovers Urban Fantasy with Demons, Portals, Witches, Renegade Gods, & Other Assorted Beasties (Light & Shadow Book 1) Page 7